


Unclose Me

by Schwoozie



Category: Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Bethyl Week, F/M, Fingerfucking, Hands
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-17
Updated: 2014-07-17
Packaged: 2018-02-09 06:46:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1972914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Schwoozie/pseuds/Schwoozie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Beth is well versed in the world of men's hands—Jimmy's timid to Zach's soft, her father's sturdy to Otis's sweet. Daryl Dixon's, however, are something new.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unclose Me

**Author's Note:**

> Eternal love to milkshakemicrowave; Mary, you complete me.
> 
> Set in Still, sometime between the trunk and the suck-ass camp.
> 
> (somewhat) Written for the prompt: Enchanted.

Beth grew to womanhood under the guidance of sweet men with work-hewn hands—hands known to labor but rarely to violence—as capable of easing a baby to sleep as wielding a hoe, or slaughtering a chicken. Her father's hands, at the turn, had been strong and soft—trained from a childhood of hard labor under a hard father to an adulthood of relative ease. Where once he had worked dawn til dusk with plow and ax, splitting rocks till he bled and coming home to bleed some more under his father's fists, at the turn his hands more often worked a tractor than niggled a shovel, eased a horse's neck and spread across his daughters' heads. Beth remembers the sickly nights of her childhood when he would smooth back the hair from her forehead, count the doodlebugs across the fronts of her arms.

By the end, his hands were hard again, but never harsh—not in the way they maybe had to be.

Jimmy never had a chance to grow hard, poor boy. His hands were strong hands, farmer's hands—but they were timid when they fluttered across her back or petted the ends of her hair. It's no wonder he couldn't hold onto her, once the rest of them came—that as she watched Rick with his python and even Glenn on her sister's arm, she knew what a man's hands could be—she thought she knew.

Otis's hands had been beefy, pawing and gentle; undeserving of what they got. Beth had seen Patricia giggling with him, the night of their wedding, tucked around the corner of the barn. They'd looked beautiful to her young eyes; Patricia in her homespun dress, glimmering in the starlight; Otis balding and glowing with love as his hands let down the bands on her hair one by one; as they slid within the cups of her dress, making her gasp; as they ran the lengths of her legs and made love to her in the moonlight. It took a long time for Beth to realize she shouldn’t be seeing what she was seeing; and by then she'd added a new category to men's hands—that of a lover, that of a Man.

Zach was a surprise, a delightful one—slim-boned and soft-touched, with fingers nimble from computer keys and X-Box buttons, baby soft—but still bold and sure as they roamed across her body in the showers, inviting her hand to his cock with a crooked smile, a flutter of fingers on her wrist. He was cocky in speech but in bed his touch was slight, sweet and gently tried. She wonders, sometimes, if she had grabbed those hands like she wanted to, sunk them between her thighs or the crease of her ass, if they would have grown strong enough—if she had led a boy's hands to become a man's, if they might have survived.

She can hardly speak of Daryl Dixon's hands, what they do to her. It's beyond words, in what she knows of the world, of men's hands. They are scarred, and battered; caked with dirt, more often than not, with blood and his own sweat under fingernails bitten short by nerves. Square palmed, sturdy on his wrists, reaching from his arms like the main branch of a tree. She's seen them gut a deer as calmly as they hold Judith to his chest; haul a man to his feet with the same strength they use to pound a walker's head into the ground. They're hands that have lived, hands that have seen.

When she touches herself at night, she pretends they're seeing her.

She imagines herself at the mercy of those hands. When he touches her shoulder to get her attention, she sees herself on her stomach, his hands splayed across her shoulder blades, holding her face in the dirt. When he sucks the grease off his fingers, she sees herself fluttering and flushed, watching with hooded eyes as he raises her taste to his mouth. When he caresses his crossbow with an oil cloth, or wields his blade like a snake charmer, or slices through the gut of a goat as easily as through cloth, her breath will catch, her stomach will seize, and she'll feel it—that rush of knowing older than she is, older than all of them, old as the movements of the earth.

* * *

The first time she notices them, notices him, is in the circle around Otis's memorial. Standing in that halo of strangers, the assholes who brought pain and suffering back to their world, she can hardly see through her quiet rage. Maggie doesn't see it, she knows; is too enamored with the Asian boy, in reasserting a little corner of dominance in a world suddenly beyond control. She doesn't see, no one sees, how the one called Shane looks at the wife of another; how the shake of his voice is unmatched in the hands that stand sturdy on his wrists, laying a stone on the grave he'd helped to make. There's something rotten in his marrow, Beth thinks, in the way his tendons twitch, the way his skin flashes green. Beth sees the good in people, but there's little good left in him—not when that's all anyone sees.

Sometime in this haze of grief and rage her eyes catch his across the circle. He's standing a little apart from them, chin tucked into his neck, thick boots resting solidly on the earth. Of all these new men of broad shoulders and rolling gaits, he's the one she's shied from—hasn't trusted this new stirring she felt when he swung his leg over that ridiculous bike, strolled watchful and unconcerned through her front door, barely flashing little old her a glance as he made a beeline for his sheriff. Daryl, the one called Rick had named him—a name rough and ragged as the fraying on his sleeves, the downward arches of his mouth as he meets her eyes across the grave.

She gazes stoically back, the blood pounding in her ears as he raises his chin, reads her with his eyes. He's a man accustomed to that, she thinks, taking one's measure; she feels vivisected as he runs his eyes along her limbs, head slowly rising until he's staring at her straight, unmoving, the fringe on his forehead shuddering a little in the wind. Beth feels her own self shudder as her eyes slip from his face to his knuckles, tucked under his arms like if they weren't trapped they'd wander off. Even across the circle she can see the scarring on them, the lines and grooves writ slick with blood—and she nearly sobs aloud, with the inopportune lust that shoots through her as he sinks his fingers deeper into the cleft of his arms, a slow and rolling motion that leaves her weak. Maggie takes her hand, then, and she wrenches her gaze away from his; but from then on she feels always on his scale, tipping into a chasm as yet with no name.

* * *

It doesn't happen like she expects it to. Of course, that's partly because she's trained herself never to expect it. It's been a long and hard teaching; one gained through stuttering nights alone in her bunk, her whimpering gasps interrupted by Judith's hiccups and Rick's insomniac boot-steps past her door.

She never realized in the old world, and not even in the prison, how important moments like these can be—hand sunk deep in her underwear, diddling her clit and gasping in rhythm into the watchful dark. She plays on herself like a snare drum—working in circles around her clit, swooping down deeper to gather up the sopping moisture, feeling the drag of her hair as she rolls her neck and squeezes her eyes and bites her lip against a moan, against the sound. How ironic it would be, for Daryl to come back to the cabin they've shacked up in to find her a half eaten corpse, a hand between her legs, sunk in dreams of him. And it's him she thinks about, has thought about since his hands brushed hers as he first took Judith from her arms, since that night when she dashed back to her cell and nearly made herself scream. She's closing in on the scream now, head trapped in the floaty fantasy of the impending orgasm, the build and the rush as she spills herself over into a blissful moment of pure nothingness.

He'll tease her later, when the moment isn't so fresh, when they've learned each other enough to know the buttons that need pushing, how lucky she was that it had been him in the door at that moment, not another random passer-by; how the sight of her tangled in the filthy sheets, limbs splayed akimbo beneath the blast radius of her hair, tumbling and unbound, would have undone a lesser man; it undid him, as he stood in the door watching her come down, panting and pressing a weepy smile into the pillow, turning onto her side and squeezing her eyes shut.

She mistakes his footsteps for the pounding of her heart; she thinks nothing of the dip of the bed, nothing against the aftershocks rocking her body; it isn't until his hand curls over her hip—a filthy hand, a heavy hand—that she realizes that anything has changed at all.

She recognizes him, of course—learned the thrum of his presence in that night in the trunk, when all she had was the knowledge that she wasn't in that terror alone. That fearful arousal is something like what she feels now, but inverted; where then her lust had come from the fear, now the fear comes from lust, the mountain of it, impaling her body on its cliffs.

“You're back early,” she says as her body begins to shake, overcome with everything—the orgasm her cunt still shudders from, the smell of earth and death he brings with him, the furnace of his body pressing tight to her back. Her voice is small, too much like a child's; he pinches her hip harshly. _Don't be a pussy, Greene,_ his fear-bitten fingers seem to say; _You've been waiting for us your whole life._

“Was worried 'bout you, here all alone,” he rumbles, and she feels every syllable in the cavities of her body, the chasms waiting to be filled.

“I can take care of myself,” she breathes, hoping.

He pinches her again, deeper towards her thigh. “I noticed.” She feels his nose in her hair, snuffling in until he finds her scalp, drags his scruff across it; his fingers are gliding across her hip and his cock is hard on her ass and her hand is still deep in her panties.

“Open your legs, Greene,” he murmurs. He slides his fingers down.

It's a tight fit, the two of them down there, nestled together in her thick thatch of fur; she feels the pulse jump from her thumb to his, bites her lip as he tugs at her pubic hair and makes her whimper.

They stay like that for a few minutes; her hand loosely cupping her sex, overstimulating just from its trembling, his hand carding through her pubic hair like through the mane of a horse. If she didn't feel his heartbeat thundering against her back, she'd think he was unaffected by this earthquake between them, the tremors that rocket through the air and in rivers up her thighs. His scent wraps around her tighter even than the arm that pins her own to her side.

She nearly passes out when his hand sinks down further to nudge hers aside.

She rests her trembling hand against her abdomen as he goes lower and lower, splitting his fingers into a crab claw and drawing them up and down her lips. She whimpers as his fingertips drag through her hair, teasing the follicles of her most sensitive parts, making the lips pucker and pop. With each drag the side of his thumb brushes the flesh covering her clit and she spreads her legs as minutely as she can—hoping he doesn't notice, hoping that he does.

And he does; he tells her in a chuckle deep in his chest, deep enough she feels it in the dip of her back.

“You want this, huh? Want me in your cunt?” he asks, sliding a finger between her lips to give her a firm upward stroke and she couldn't reply if she wanted to. He buries his face in the back of her head, inhaling obscenely, and she wonders if that's the sound he'd make if she put her hand on his dick; if he'd growl like he does when urging her down the road, if his eyes would cut like they did in the trunk. She pulls at her trapped arm and he only chuckles again, continuing to stroke her, slowly, maddeningly, the tip of his nail dragging across her hood with every pass. She's making the most desperate of noises, circling her ass back against his hips as he yanks her closer by the clit. She whimpers and drags her fingernails across her own abdomen, looking for something to hold onto so her head doesn't fly into a million pieces.

“Daryl,” she whines, squeezing her eyes tight, feeling the slip-slide of his finger in the wetness of her previous orgasm. No matter how she came by it, it's his now; it belongs to him with every catch of his calluses against the flesh of her cunt, the drag of the hairs on his wrist and the bite of nails accidental and not. He's still only touched her clit and the base of her opening and she slides a leg back over his, opening up, opening to him.

“I ain't a mindreader,” he murmurs softly, leaning forward and biting at her carotid. “You got somethin' to tell me?”

“Please Daryl,” she whispers.

“Gotta speak up, darlin'.”

“Daryl, please.” She squeezes down against his ankle, trying to draw him closer, memorize the slow slide of his cock against her ass. “Please, faster—“

He's kissing up and down her neck to the rhythm of his finger, which is to say slow, slow, maddeningly head-splittingly aggressively slow in the stroke of his finger and the flex of his palm, the lightest brushes of his other knuckles as he works her to madness. She's biting her lip and squeezing her eyes closed and it's only when a particular pass drags an involuntary keen from her throat that he moves, sinking his middle finger into her heat and groaning.

“Christ, Beth,” he mutters, and lord it makes her stutter, the way he's losing control, “That all for me?”

“Yes, you,” she breathes, arching her back against the finally, finally the stroke of him deep inside her, the square of his palm pressed to her clit and the calluses of his fingertips snagging her G-spot with every thrust. She's writhing against him now and he's stopped kissing her neck, is just watching her, she can feel his breath on her neck as he watches his own hand disappearing between her legs, dipping down into the chasm and spreading her wide. She can't stop moaning, little breaths and gasps that sound strangely like his name, like _please_ and _more_ and _your hands on me is like thermite in my veins_ and when he slides his other arm under her neck she doesn't hesitate to bite at the first spot she can reach.

He hisses as her teeth meet his flesh and grinds down hard with the heel of his hand, making her keen, making her buck and suck at the arm in front of her like it's attached to a tit, rolling further over to better meet the press of his hand and his salty sweaty singing flesh against her lips. He's rubbing his cock off against her hip and grunting as he finally begins fucking her in earnest, adding a second finger and then a third and she digs moon-shaped crescents into her own thigh and stomach as he grunts along behind her.

Her breaths are coming shorter and shorter and they're the only sound in the room, the only sound in the world as he fucks her on his fingers, as she fucks herself on his fingers, as he draws his other hand towards himself so he can clasp her throat and drag her against him brutally, choking her breath more from the shock than the pressure as pleasure sings through the crux of her thighs. He draws her back and she plunges them forward, see-sawing between the press of his cock and the heat of his hand. They're panting and moaning and she finally remembers the hand on her abdomen, drags it up to grasp his hand and sink his fingers into her mouth.

He growls out a sound almost like her name, almost like a curse as he slams his hand up into her, spreading her brutally and rubbing her hard and she bites his fingers halfway to the bone when her crescendo hits the edge and she erupts into fireworks.

She comes like an avalanche, wailing through the stars in her eyes and the fire in her clit and he refuses to stop, keeps fucking her, keeps fucking, mouthing words against her neck as she comes and comes and he shoots inside his trousers like a boy.

In the after they lie in a sweaty heap, undone, spent, the wash of breath a balm on their overheated flesh. As the aftershocks shudder through her she mouths at the fingers still between her lips, tasting the dirt of the road and their ropey, brutal strength. When he pulls out of her pussy and brings the other hand to her lips, she doesn't hesitate to lap that up too. She hums weakly against the pads of his fingers, pruned and pebbly on her tongue. He slides a leg between hers, allowing her something to undulate against softly, to hold onto until the tremoring finally abates.

It's many minutes later, and in a voice still breathless, that he finally speaks: “Got a thing for m'hands, huh?”

She rolls over, head pillowed on his bicep (and lord how she'd love to go for a ride on that—next time, next time, please lord, let the world afford them a next time). It's strange to look at him out in the world, somewhere beyond the backs of her eyelids. It thrills her to see he's just as wild eyed as she feels, blue eyes nearly glowing with it; his cheeks are a deep, ruddy red beneath the dirt. His thin lips are parted, gasping; not pressed thin like they were across the grave, as they shared the condemnation of a guilty man; not upturned in laughter at the suckling baby in his arms. They hang open, inviting, letting her in.

She leans forward and slots her mouth over his; not kissing—not kissing as she knew it with Jimmy and Zach and little Bobby Brown and his third grade lips. She breathes him in, his rancid breath of the overcooked squirrel they ate the night before, the tinned beans they had for breakfast; lord knows what her own breath tastes like. But he takes what she gives, cupping a hand from her chin nearly to the crown of her head. Their eyes are open as they look at one another, take their measure. For the first time since the fall of the prison, she sees someone. He sees her back.

Of all the words for all the hands that Beth has known, there's only one word she'll give to Daryl Dixon's that matters:

Hers.

 

 


End file.
